1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to disk drives. More particularly, the present invention relates to actuator arm assemblies and constituent parts thereof and methods of making such actuator arm assemblies.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A typical hard disk drive includes a head disk assembly (“HDA”) and a printed circuit board assembly (“PCBA”). The HDA includes at least one magnetic disk (“disk”), a spindle motor for rotating the disk, and a head stack assembly (“HSA”) that includes a slider with at least one transducer or read/write element for reading and writing data. The HSA is controllably positioned by a servo system in order to read or write information from or to particular tracks on the disk. The typical HSA has three primary portions: (1) an actuator arm assembly that moves in response to the servo control system; (2) a head gimbal assembly (“HGA”) that extends from the actuator arm assembly and biases the slider toward the disk; and (3) a flex cable assembly that provides an electrical interconnect with minimal constraint on movement.
A typical HGA includes a load beam, a gimbal attached to an end of the load beam, and a slider attached to the gimbal. The load beam has a spring function that provides a “gram load” biasing force and a hinge function that permits the slider to follow the surface contour of the spinning disk. The load beam has an actuator end that connects to the actuator arm and a gimbal end that connects to the gimbal that supports the slider and transmits the gram load biasing force to the slider to “load” the slider against the disk. A rapidly spinning disk develops a laminar airflow above its surface that lifts the slider away from the disk in opposition to the gram load biasing force. The slider is said to be “flying” over the disk when in this state.
FIG. 1A shows an exploded view of portions of a conventional actuator arm assembly that includes two separate and distinct extruded actuator arms. FIG. 1B shows the portions of the conventional actuator arm assembly of FIG. 1A, with the collar fitted to the two separate and distinct extruded actuator arms. Considering now FIGS. 1A and 1B collectively, the portions of the conventional actuator arm assembly shown include a first actuator arm 102 and a second actuator arm 104 and an actuator assembly collar 106. As shown, each of the conventional actuator arms 102, 104 is a separate and distinct actuator arm and is formed by a relatively costly extrusion process. A chemical polishing step may be carried out to polish the surfaces of the actuator arms and to remove any unwanted artifacts of the extrusion process. The collar 106 may then be fitted to both actuator arms, which stiffens the resultant actuator arm assembly. However, even though the separate and distinct actuator arms 104, 106 are mechanically coupled to one another by the collar 106, the structure nevertheless still suffers from unwanted resonance modes, which detrimentally affect the performance of the disk drive in which such a conventional actuator arm assembly is utilized.
From the foregoing, it may be appreciated that less costly and higher performing alternatives to conventional extruded arm assemblies (an exemplar of which is shown in FIG. 1B) are desirable.